This paper tries to estimate the capital investment required for the fixed-telephony network switching equipment as demanded by the fourth national development plan. As a first step, the Cobb-Douglas model is used as a successful demand forecasting model to estimate the demand over the target years. Then, an architectural plan is developed for the fixed-telephony switching network that takes in...

Ramsey models of fiscal and monetary policy featuring time-separable preferences and a fixed supply of capital predict highly volatile inflation with no serial correlation. In this paper, we show that an otherwise-standard Ramsey model that incorporates capital accumulation and habit persistence predicts highly persistent inflation. The result depends on increases in either the ability to smoot...

With increasing international competition it is imperative that the South African sugar industry improves cane yields and quality, and curtails production costs. It is thus likely that increasing domestic labour costs will result in the long-run substitution of capital for labour (i.e. increased mechanisation). Given the high cost and indivisible (or lumpy) nature of mechanical inputs, it is im...

When does efficiency in the household imply specialization? For example, if we recognize two sectors, “market” and “household,” when does efficiency imply that one spouse specializes in the market and the other in the household? If efficiency did imply specialization, then egalitarian marriages would be inefficient and an equity-efficiency tradeoff inescapable. This paper clarifies the roles th...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the causal effect of social capital on health using waves 2008 and 2012 data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey. We use ADL index and CES-D to measure individuals’ physical and mental health respectively. Our study controls for individual unobserved, time-invariant heterogeneity by using individual-level fixed effects and accou...

The phenomenal success of East Asian economies has centered attention on the source of their economic growth. Recent studies based on neoclassical theory have produced controversial results: the most important source of economic growth of the East Asian countries (except Japan) is capital accumulation, and the estimated rate of technological progress is very small and, in some cases, substantia...

We describe a numerical procedure to obtain bounds on the distribution function of a sum of n dependent risks having fixed marginals. With respect to the existing literature, our method provides improved bounds and can be applied also to large non-homogeneous portfolios of risks. As an application, we compute the VaR-based minimum capital requirement for a portfolio of operational risk losses.